If a CEO is looking for transformational results, the power of the transformation has to emerge out of one of two things: how bad things currently are, or, how enticing is the vision of the future.
In the event current conditions don’t expose an enterprise in crisis or in serious need of repair, latency weighs the enterprise down like an anchor. The more vested is the latency, the heavier the enterprise is to move. The CEO’s vision, in that case, needs to be extraordinarily aspirational for what the future promises. If that promise is remote, the vision will be tough to carry.
A CEO earns his or her stripes not by just managing an enterprise away from crisis, but also by conceptualizing a vision of the future and communicating it with passion and power when the enterprise is not in crisis. It is that incessant conceptualization and communication, in fact, which keeps the company out of crisis.
Original writing date: March 1, 2007